MUMBAI: On August 29, 2003, when Alastair Campbell stepped down as spokesman of UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, most of the attention focussed on his role in controversies linked to the Iraq War. But the media also speculated on his future plans. "There is talk that a £1m-plus bidding war is set to break out for Campbell's diaries, which are likely to be explosive," reported Campaign, the advertising magazine.

Such frank acceptance of future revelations stands in contrast to the shock and fury that has greeted the publication of a tell-all book by Sanjaya Baru, the erstwhile media advisor to PM Manmohan Singh. Baru has been accused of betraying his former boss, of playing politics by launching the book in the election season and of aiming to make money by sensationalising the content.

For his part, Baru has loftily dismissed the allegations, claiming the publisher determined the launch timing, and refusing to countenance any idea of betrayal or politicking. But the stands on both sides seem a bit disingenuous. Any survey of political memoirs, particularly by press secretaries, suggests that the motives for writing them tend to be multiple and hardly unconnected to monetary gain.

This stems from their place in the political hierarchy, close to the action yet way down the pecking chain. Many of the most interesting political memoirs are written not by top leaders, but by people who deal with the operations behind the scenes, like party whips and general secretaries. Press officers are also operations people, but are rarely career politicians. They tend to be journalists who take on the job for a short stint, with no aspirations to a longer career that might enforce caution. It also helps that they usually need the money and can write rapidly and readably.

The PM and his party were naive not to know this, but they could point to the relative rarity of the revelatory memoir in India. There have been scurrilous books before like Reminiscences of the Nehru Age by Jawaharlal Nehru's secretary MO Mathai, with its bizarre blank chapter on Indira Gandhi that manages maximum insinuation with minimum effort. But such books usually came out after the main people in them are dead or out of power (Mathai's book came out during the Janata years).

Baru's book is more in the tradition that Julian Glover describes in the Guardian in a survey of political memoirs: "the sharpest political books always arrive when a government is on the slide." They ride on the high profile of the people they talk about, the sense of being able to hurt them, and to sell more copies on that basis. In a month from now, whatever the election results, Dr Singh will no longer be PM, the news cycle will be focused on his successor, and interest in him will be falling by the minute.

Baru's publisher knows this very well. The book is meant for a culture of politics as reality TV, which this prolonged election cycle has accentuated. It is a well established trend abroad, where incessant news coverage, social media scrutiny and the need to compete with popular media ruled by actual TV reality shows mean that the books too have to hype up their controversies, even focussing on sex, with Blair serving as a particular focus, whether in his wife's descriptions of packing contraceptives when they go to stay with the Queen or another book's description of his exceptionally tight jeans.

Is that where Indian political memoirs are heading? VK Karthika, publisher and chief editor at HarperCollins says that memoirs and biographies are a growing field: "It is a genre that is going to expand as more people write them and do them better." But she also points out that one of the top selling memoirs ever published in India is of ex-President APJ Abdul Kalam, a book that has sold over 150,000 copies. It has no shocking revelations and really falls in the inspirational, self-help category. Kalam might be only a quasi-political figure, so a better example is Keeping the Faith, the memoirs of ex-Speaker Somnath Chatterjee.

Karthika says it had a hardback print run of 10,000 and sold well: "It was bought, I guess, by all those who are interested in politics, in the history of the Left in India, and of course by those who wanted to check if they figured in it and what he had to say about them. And of course we sold the most in West Bengal/Kolkata." It doesn't have explosive revelations, but does have a fair amount of score settling with his erstwhile CPM comrades who expelled him from the party.

This does help drive sales of this more muted type of political memoir. Priya Kapoor, editorial director at Roli Books, recalls being with the widow of a noted establishment figure of the Indira Gandhi years when a book by one of her husband's contemporaries arrived: "The first thing she did was turn to the index and see how where her husband's name was mentioned."